Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, Series Number 104)

"Responding to the lively resurgence of literary formalism, this volume delivers a timely and fresh exploration of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Advancing 'new formalist' approaches, medieval scholars have begun to ask what happens when structure fails to yield meaning, probing the very limits of poetic organization. While Chaucer is acknowledged as a master of form, his work also foregrounds troubling questions about formal agency: the disparate forces of narrative and poetic practice, readerly reception, intertextuality, genre, scribal attention, patronage, and historical change. This definitive collection of essays offers diverse perspectives on Chaucer and a varied analysis of these problems, asking what happens when form is resisted by author or reader, when it fails by accident or by design, and how it can be misleading, errant, or even dangerous"-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Half-title 3 Series information 4 Title page 5 Copyright information 6 Table of contents 7 List of contributors 9 Acknowledgments 11 Introduction 13 Formalism and Medieval Literature 15 New Formalisms in Medieval Literary Studies 17 The Subversions of Form 20 Notes 27 Part I The Failures of Form 31 Chapter 1 “many a lay and many a thing”: Chaucer’s Technical Terms 33 Notes 46 Chapter 2 Chaucer’s Aesthetic Resources: Nature, Longing, and Economies of Form 50 Roundness: Boethian Sense-Perception and the Apprehension of Form 53 Purposiveness: Kant, Free Natural Beauty, and the Formal Object 57 Insufficiencies: “The Former Age” and “Fortune” in Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.3.21 59 Conclusion 65 Notes 66 Chapter 3 Against Order: Medieval, Modern, and Contemporary Critiques of Causality 73 The House of Fame 75 To the Lighthouse 82 My Life 86 Notes 92 Part II The Corporeality of Form 95 Chapter 4 Diverging Forms: Disability and the Monk’s Tales 97 Renouncing Form 97 Form and Genre of “Tragedie” 99 Asserting Norms 100 Breaking Form 103 Formal Prosthesis 104 Disability Futures 107 Notes 109 Chapter 5 Figures for “Gretter Knowing”: Forms in the Treatise on the Astrolabe 111 “Ful notable fourme”: Textual, Mechanical, and Cosmological Wholes 114 “In manere of a nett”: The Cosmic Network 117 “Ones for evere” and “Evermo”: Reliable Knowledge, Eternal Rhythms 121 “All the world”: Nonhierarchical Binaries, or The Equinox Effect 125 Notes 131 Chapter 6 The Heaviness of Prosopopoeial Form in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess 137 Notes 154 Part III The Forms of Reception 159 Chapter 7 Reading Badly: What the Physician’s Tale Isn’t Telling Us 161 Notes 173 Chapter 8 Birdsong, Love, and the House of Lancaster Gower Reforms Chaucer: Gower Reforms Chaucer 177 Notes 192 Chapter 9 Opening The Canterbury Tales: Form and Formalism in the General Prologue 194 Notes 210 Bibliography 213 Index 229 This exploration of literary form in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer delivers a timely and fresh approach to the study of one of the best known medieval English poets. This definitive collection of essays offers a variety of approaches to Chaucer and to the analysis of form. Brings 'new Formalist' Approaches To Chaucer, Focusing On Formal Agency, Bodies, Disability, Ethics, Poetics, Reception, And Scale.